What’s in a name? Taxonomy humor…

Ba humbugi

If you’re going to be responsible for determining scientific classification, you may as well have fun with it. From BuzzFeed, some of the strangest and most amusing binomial names (Genus species) in all of taxonomy…

As we wonder what’s in a name, we might spare a taxonomical thought for Sir D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson CB FRS FRSE; he died on this date in 1948. The Scottish biologist, mathematician, and classics scholar was the father of mathematical biologist. Starting from the simple premise that “everything is the way it is because it got that way,” Thompson wrote On Growth and Form (1917)– a profound meditation the shapes of living things that has been called by Nobel Laureate Peter Medawar “the finest work of literature in all the annals of science that have been recorded in the English tongue.”